99 replies to this topic

[TVCasualty]

I wanted to highlight this line since I feel that it's much more significant (and troubling) than it seems [emphasis mine]:

 

One can imagine a car owned by a prankster or terrorist jiggling its steering wheel in just such a way as to cause a nearby car to needlessly swerve off the road

 

 

I can remember a time not too long ago when technology had not yet evolved to the point where it became possible for pranksters to so easily find themselves on par with terrorists (all it will take in the near future is jiggling a steering wheel, apparently).

 

This just illustrates why all of our problems and most of the threats we face are largely if not entirely a function of consciousness (or a lack thereof).

 

When everyone can get almost anything they want just because they want it (it's illegal? Fuck it I'll just 3D print one then...) or critical infrastructure can be thrown into chaos with cardboard and stickers then security can really only come from a collective lack of desire to fuck with each other. And we're getting closer to that point every day, but our efforts at promoting the consciousness-expansion we'll need in order to handle it are lagging way too far behind.

 

So it seems that even if we save the proverbial world from impending ecological collapse and avoid or prevent a pandemic and get lucky with space rocks missing us we're STILL going to end up with a crazy-intense society where more or less anything goes if someone wants it to, and getting a conviction for crimes with victims will get tougher as every Defense lawyer will cite a rather compelling "deepfake defense" against any video or audio evidence by demanding it be proven to be real, which is really hard if not impossible (but crimes with no victim will get easier to defend since we'll have AI lawyers who will find the loopholes in the rules and start faking a seizure in the Courtroom or something).

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

I see a dark side to digitization of lawyers. If suing someone used to be costly and difficult, image the flood gates of holy bullshit litigation when a bot can do all the hard tedious work for you. Think patent trolls and the such, will this just enable scammers to go next level?

Edited by flashingrooster, 13 January 2020 - 10:46 AM.

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

 

You know how technology (especially military tech) has advanced to levels that were scarcely imaginable only a few years ago, yet the military still depends most of all on a soldier with a rifle like has been the case since the invention of the rifle? There are many good reasons for this, and they are basically the same reasons why autonomous vehicles (among other high-tech but overly-complex developments) won’t be anywhere near the miraculous game-changing innovations that the people selling them claim.



 

 

I suppose all it takes in another invention to be able to implement it. The autonomous trucks have been used with great success here

 

[Direct Link]

 

 

But when it comes to militarization, yeah the deadliest weapon on the planet has been and will always be the rife. Small arms that can be and is used every day to secure power

Edited by flashingrooster, 13 January 2020 - 10:43 AM.

[TVCasualty]

I see a dark side to digitization of lawyers. If suing someone used to be costly and difficult, image the flood gates of holy bullshit litigation when a bot can do all the hard tedious work for you. Think patent trolls and the such, will this just enable scammers to go next level?

 

Of course, but then your adversary will also be using an AI lawyer so cases would be argued and settled in milliseconds, at least if argued before AI Judges. The appeals, however, will take decades.

 

It's almost looking like we're making ourselves irrelevant to our own society. Who needs people when 'bots and algorithms got it all covered? It's almost like an effort is being made to prepare for a sudden and precipitous drop in the world's population.

 

The timing is critical since you certainly don't want to unleash the pandemic before the essential stuff is sufficiently automated.

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

Reminds me of the autofac philip k dicks episode. In a near future where autonomous factories were produced during the war.

These factories soon got out of control after the apocalyptic event killed off most of society. They control all resources and the transport of such, people are isolated in these small communities and are provided useless goods dropped by the autofac drones

 

 Here is a more accurate description

 

It is set some years after an apocalyptic world war has devastated Earth's civilizations, leaving only a network of hardened robot "autofacs" in operation to supply goods to the human survivors. Once humanity has recovered enough to want to begin reconstruction, the autofacs are immediately targeted for shutdown since they monopolize the planet's resources, but the ability to control them was lost in the war. This leaves the future of humanity, and the planet, in uncertainty as the autofacs consume every resource they can attain to produce what they perceive as needed. The story involves the human survivors as they try to steal the supplies they need and search for a way to take the power of production back into their own hands.

Edited by flashingrooster, 13 January 2020 - 11:56 AM.

[TVCasualty]

I really liked that story (I've watched that series).

 

I just wish it was purely fictional rather than an allegory bordering on the literal.

[TVCasualty]

So since I posted this thread only a little bit over a month ago the fires continue to rage in drought-stricken Australia (when not being pummeled by big hail and the mixed blessing of flooding downpours), a pandemic has apparently emerged from exactly where everyone who studies such things expected it to, and now parts of Africa are contending with swarms of locusts that risk causing a mass famine, which are expected to become a more frequent event as global warming continues.

 

I thought I had at least another year before plagues and pestilence began in earnest, maybe two. But then I've always been an irrepressible optimist.

 

And that's not even to mention the earthquakes. Or the ongoing reemergence of ancient "zombie diseases" we have no immunity for as the permafrost melts further North and deeper every year.

 

It's enough to make me want to go re-read Revelation to see what's next...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...Uh-oh.

[CatsAndBats]

Strengthening coronavirus surges across China as authorities expect 1,000 more cases; third case confirmed in U.S.

 

Health authorities in China are struggling to deal with a skyrocketing infection rate in the country of the new coronavirus, with the number of cases increasing 50 percent in just 24 hours.

 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has warned of an "accelerating spread" of the coronavirus, adding to worries about the scope of a health crisis that has claimed at least 56 lives and triggered emergency health measures in cities across China.

 

More than 50 million people were ordered on lockdown in central China, with a travel ban covering 16 cities in the central Hubei province, where the virus was first encountered. Here’s what we know:

 

● A third infection was announced in the United States, a Chinese traveler from Wuhan. Infections have also been confirmed in France, South Korea, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and Australia. We’re mapping the spread here.

 

● The mayor of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, said he expects at least 1,000 more cases of infection to surface.

 

● Health Minister Ma Xiaowei said Sunday that the transmissibility of the virus is increasing, while the vice minister of industry, Wang Jiangping, said China could not produce enough medical supplies to address demand.

 

● The sale of wild animals has been banned for the duration of the crisis. A wild-animal market in Wuhan is widely seen as the epicenter of the outbreak.

 

● Travel bans were extended in central China, putting tens of millions of people effectively on lockdown. In Wuhan, where the virus was first detected, workers are racing to build at least three pop-up 1,000-bed hospitals. The situation is especially dire in the countryside, where the medical infrastructure is poor. Beijing said there were no plans for a travel ban in the capital.

 

 

The rest here: https://www.washingt...60b1_story.html

 

 

That's what they get for eating bats! So, this thread will be moot as most of us will be dead in a couple of months.

[Alder Logs]

I'm an optimist to the bitter end.

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

I think expecting the world to act any other way than chaotic is totally ridiculous. Order is a man made construct. The universe is chaos and we pattern seeking animals desperately and unsuccessfully try to make sense of it all.

 

 

 

On another note

 

It's that same pattern seeking mechanism that get's people into conspiracy theories. Only they can see the true tiger hiding in the sea of  "grass", i mean information

Edited by flashingrooster, 27 January 2020 - 10:32 AM.

[TVCasualty]

I'm an optimist to the bitter end.

 

 

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

[Direct Link]

Edited by flashingrooster, 31 January 2020 - 09:32 PM.

[TVCasualty]

That's kind of a trip; I've seen that exact same animation set to three different soundtracks (including the one you posted).

 

The first one I found (and that has the most poignant music for it) was this one:

 

[Direct Link]

[TVCasualty]

So it turns out that the kind of "perfect storm" that can trash our civilization has happened before. Back around the year 1177 BCE, apparently. History suggests that highly-complex societies and climate change do not mix well, which isn't too surprising.
 
https://www.npr.org/...ation-collapsed
 

Consider this, if you would: a network of far-flung, powerful, high-tech civilizations closely tied by trade and diplomatic embassies; an accelerating threat of climate change and its pressure on food production; a rising wave of displaced populations ready to sweep across and overwhelm developed nations.
 
Sound familiar?
 
While that laundry list of impending doom could be aimed at our era, it's actually a description of the world 3,000 years ago. It is humanity's first "global" dark age as described by archaeologist and George Washington University professor Eric H. Cline in his recent book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

 
 It appears that when analyzed as a species, humans learn little things (i.e., how to make stuff) really quickly but learn big things (what to do with that stuff, how to keep the stuff we make) very, very slowly.
 

1177 B.C. is, for Cline, a milepost. A thousand years before Rome or Christ or Buddha, there existed a powerful array of civilizations in the Near and Middle East that had risen to the height of their glory. Then, fairly suddenly, the great web of interconnected civilizations imploded and disappeared.

 

So what took all these cultures down at the same time? The story begins, but does not end, with climate change.
...

The world of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians was complex, in the technical meaning of the word. It was a system with many agents and many overlapping connections. That complexity was both a strength and weakness. Cline points to recent research in the study of so-called complex systems that shows how susceptible they can be to cascades of disruption and failure from even small perturbations. Perhaps, Cline says, the Bronze Age societies exhibited the property called "hypercoherence" where interdependencies are so complex that stability becomes ever harder to maintain.
 
So, what exactly is the lesson Cline thinks we should take away from 1177 B.C.? In an email to me, Cline wrote:

"We should be aware that no society is invulnerable and that every society in the history of the world has ultimately collapsed. We should also be thankful that we are advanced enough to understand what is happening."

But are we advanced enough to do anything with our understanding?

 
I'd say "no, at least not to any degree that can actually change anything."

 

Not necessarily because we lack the technology or the will (though we still appear to lack both), but because the inherent nature of highly-complex systems makes them all but impossible to impose a significant degree of arbitrary Order upon once they reach some threshold of complexity (which can probably only be quantified in retrospect).

 

Once such a tipping point is reached, the collapse of that particular ordered system is likely inevitable and all we can really do is look back on what happened afterward and try to determine exactly when that point was actually crossed. But like with the civilizations that collapsed in 1177 BCE, looking back and figuring out where things went sideways hasn't helped us avoid making the same mistakes again so there's no reason to think we're going to learn anything when this one collapses, either.

 

But thanks to Chaos, the door remains open to the vanishingly-improbable which means nothing's really 'inevitable,' though some outcomes are FAR more probable than others.

 

 

[Alder Logs]

Again I would point one to the works of Immanuel Velikovsky, though the years in question might vary to a degree.  To try to guess what happened then by way of what's happening now would be foolish in my estimation.  Whatever went down in the "recent" past of Earth, it doesn't look like they had nuclear power plants all over the place.  So however the coming collapse unfolds, it ain't going to look like those of recent millennia. 

[TVCasualty]

This is really interesting. To me, anyway. The following clip explores Conway's "Game of Life" and how it might suggest we're living in a simulated Universe:

 

[Direct Link]

 

It's pretty funny when Rogan's mind gets blown and all he can reply with is "Jesus," lol.

 

 

The rules for the Game of Life are explained here in much greater detail, which helps with understanding what's going on in the simulations. It sure doesn't take long at all for extreme simplicity to generate extreme complexity, which in turn generates extreme weirdness, which might include the Universe itself:

 

[Direct Link]

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

I think it is an interesting concept to entertain, add it to the list of possibilities 

 

Edited by flashingrooster, 08 February 2020 - 06:03 PM.

[TVCasualty]

I think it is an interesting concept to entertain, add it to the list of possibilities 

 

It looks to me like the blueprints for the Universe. The concepts explained in that video and the one about Langdon's Ant are deceptively simplistic, probably because we intuitively believe that the underlying architecture of reality must be complicated because reality is complicated. But its perceived complexity only exists as an emergent property of stacked and iterated simplicity.

 

It's why it's hard to tell at first glance if this is mycelium growing over a substrate or the Colorado River delta (among countless other examples):

 

 

 

 

Attached Thumbnails

• 

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

If I am understanding it correctly. I like to think there are all these forces controlling things somehow coming together making a complex system. While it could be the opposite. Everything has it's own singular simple systems of control, or force or, blue prints whatever you want to call it. I am feeling like Joe at the moment

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

You know I watched that apocalyptico for the first time a week or so ago. It got me thinking about that whole notion of would we be better without all this technology, go back to their way of living. Nomadic tribal groups. It raised an interesting point when there village was attacked and totally wiped out. It showed how easily an apocalyptic event could happen, or at least your perception of the world would seem to come to an end.

 Our lives are so comfortable in this new age we forget, or rather we never knew. Like the simple fact that someone could just walk up and bash your brains in and that was the end of that. Or you got eaten by another animal. We are so disconnected from that notion i think it would be impossible to guess how their lives were